5th day highlights

Highlights from Day 5

After a jam packed last four days it was a bit of a shock to discover that it was actually Friday and the last day of the residential. Still that didn’t mean we were taking it easy!

The were three main themes up for discussion on the final day:

What is an Archives 2.0?

How do you re-engineer to be an Archives 2.0?

What are the implications?

However, before we got started there was a shoutout to #followanarchive day ( http://twitter.com/search#search?q=%23followanarchive ) as well as the news that @naagovau ( http://twitter.com/naagovau ) had arrived on Twitter!  Lucky we set up those Twitter accounts last night. Delegates were given the OK to tweet during the day(but keep listening).

Becoming an Archives 2.0

Dagmar Parer

Dagmar began the official part of the program with a presentation and discussion about the social web and the importance of an organisations culture. The key point underpinning the session was that adapting to the social web is as much about internal change for an organisation as it is external communication.  An organisation can’t effectively adapt to the social web unless the internal factors are addressed.

The characteristics of the social web such as building collaborative relationships, transparency and crowdsourcing are a challenge for an organisation with a culture that focuses on control. “For most organisations adopting the social web means changing their mindset about why they exist and how they operate.”

We then broke up into groups to discuss the values of the social web (Trust, flexibility, transparency……) and how our organisations would change if they embraced these values. Everyone must have been engrossed because the pastries arrived for morning tea and no one moved.

Adrian Cunningham

Adrian picked up the session where Dagmar left off and initiated a discussion about cultural change; how to precipitate it and how to be an agent for change (while still retaining your sanity!) One text mentioned during the discussion was The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (ISBN 0-316-31696-2) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point ).

We then looked at three model types for organisations, 1.organic 2. centralised and 3. co-ordinated; and discussed which model was best suited to the needs of social media.

After this the session segued into a look at the declaration of Open Government ( http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/gov2/declaration-of-open-government.html ) and the challenges it presented for Government 1.0 .  The work of Thomas Jane Connors on the Information Policy of the government of President George W. Bush ( http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2002/JA/Feat/Conn.htm ) was suggested for further reading.

Dagmar Parer

After lunch Dagmar led the group onto the web to lookup:

Peoples Archive

Citizens Archive

Interactive User Community

Participatory archives

Participatory archive

Traditional archives

We had a discussion about the sites we were finding and their relevance (some very, some not at all) before moving on to look at the differences between a participatory archive and a participatory archives (Note: Participatory is a very tricky word to say after lunch on a Friday afternoon).

It was pointed out that in the literature there were differences between which definition applied to participatory archive (with an e) and which definition applied to participatory archives (with an s) (E.g. See the work of Ista Huvilo ( http://www.istohuvila.fi/participatory-archive-towards-decentralised-curation-radical-user-orientation-and-broader ) and Joy Palmer ( http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/palmer/ ). As a group we boldly agreed to sit on the fence.

Roughly speaking the two definitions are:

1. an online repository which users are invited to contribute to and
2. a vision for a post modern archive where all are equal in the presence of the record and in which users are active in all processes. It asks us to view all processes in a radically expanded version of uses.

Dagmar noted that definition no 2. was the type of model suitable for a government archive working towards Archives 2.0 .

A Fond Farewell

The group made a presentation to Dagmar Parer, Director of Studies, Emma Buckley, Residential Co-ordinator as well as Wendy and Russell (in absentia) to thank them for all their efforts over the past 5 days. Not only did they offer us a fantastic program that was the envy of many of the speakers attending, they looked after all 23 of us and made the whole experience a positive and empowering one. No mean feat in a seminar with 12 hour days. Thank you!

Where to next?

But wait there’s more.  The group has agreed to keep working on the business case/blueprint through the blog and to keep collaborating on Archives 2.0. Watch this space! (Which comes complete with handy RSS feed.)